We seem to do fairly well with the various friends that model with us. But we are starting to come to a very interesting discovery... The models that seem to sell best for us are US...

I've always liked having my pictures taken, so it's a given for me to be in front of the camera. But Robert, like most photographers, was TOTALLY CONVINCED that he had a face for radio :) But then, after a week of rejected images and really slow sales, we became inspired to do something a little different.

We started with this series, Hard Life. Robert is normally clean shaven and bald, but with winter upon us, he grew out his hair. He made the perfect character for what we were trying to portray. About two hours into the shoot, we decided to ...

We had our friend come by to do some new pictures with the new camera. She's always so happy to help out! Her uncle is a photographer, so she's had quite a bit of informal training at it. Compound that with her being a Cheer Captain and her always up attitude, it's always a load of fun!

Like she told me this weekend, she's not afraid of color, so we dove into her makeup kit and pulled out the paint! She has incredible eyes, and we were able to take advantage of them this time! I can't wait for those pictures to go up!

Unfortunately, with the string of misfortune this past few weeks, we are going to fall short of our goal, but... the month is not over yet! We are revisiting some images that we took with the Olympus E-10 (4mpx) and making them bolder and better ...

Well, it's been a hard journey the last week or so. Not only was our production crippled trying to work out the trojan virus, but our sales stopped across the board. Maybe it's just this time of the month, I noticed last month a decrease around the first week as well.

For now, we've decided to indeed press forward and keep going. And why not? We have a great new camera now, Olympus E-510, and are enjoying the wonderful images it produces! I've also been poking around with fractals, which will help round out our portfolio. And we have a few models coming in to shoot this weekend. So things seem to be rolling along.

We are also getting over injuries. The weather has been terrible here, and with back injuries and so forth, we've been slow moving. And he broke 2 ribs ...

It just figures, you go to upgrade, and all hell breaks loose...

Our computer registry was fouled, and we had a bad stick of RAM, so we had to reconfigure the entire machine. Fortunately, our catalog was now safe on our external, and it's only the machine we are dealing with. Why fortunate? Because, when we brought it home, we hooked it up, BAM... the Shredder Trojan attached itself to our machine. HOLY COW!!

This is one of the most annoying and nastiest viruses I've ever delt with. We've cleaned it off of our machine, but can't seem to get the pop ups to stop. Once you click on a popup, by accident, or even scrolling over them, the .exe file kicks on and attaches again.

It is real disheartening to have everything crash down at once. Our sales,...

So, GREAT NEWS!! We upgraded our camera!! YAY!! At the same time, we purchased an external hard drive, thinking we'd put the company on that. Well, somehow, in the process of installing the driver for the ext, something got screwed up...

But, it didn't mess up, right away. So, not knowing it was damaged, I began to move our catalog over to the ext. And... it crashed.

Then, the whole computer crashed, and we lost the last two weeks of images, ALL of our RAW files, everything we had in our own queue to upload, and my data files on our images...

OMG!!! Well, frantic to come up with a solution, we got some programs working to clear the registry and fix the problems, and in safe mode, we found the ext did NOT crash, it just stopped responding. WE FOUND THE DATA WE LOST!...

So, the rush is on. Our goal? 750 quality images up and running by the end of April. We are currently at 250.

The initial thought was to just flood with the images we already have, we definitely have a good 400 in our "Secondary Submission" folder. But, that's just it, they are secondary. Not quite as bold as what I chose for our first round.

The math works out to about 125 images a week. 125 images a week!! A staggering amount, and one that I was curious to see if he could meet.

And with great dedication, and definite diversity, he shoots everything he can get his hands on.

Like he always tells me, everything is a subject, it's just in how you look at it. From the lipstick tubes I have in my bathroom to a set of old keys ...

My husband has been a photographer for as long as he can remember. I, also, loved to hold a camera, and have taken some pretty impressive landscapes, haven't we all? :D But this is his story, his introduction into the crazy world we call Microstock.

Robert was getting bogged down at work, and his co-worker suggested he pick up a hobby, you know, to clear his mind. The coworker was learning photography, himself, so he would often times spend hours drilling my husband about this and that. Questions about lighting, and tabletop work, f-stops and pixel size, the excitement began to grow again. The coworker researched gallery showings and other avenues of exposing his work to the public, and ran across Microstock. He asked if Robert knew anything about ...